Dead Air

What you're looking at here is a dead air conditioning unit. One of the four units that keep Dr. No's relatively comfortable during the hottest Georgia summers has finally given up the ghost; looking at the photo that the Coolray tech took when he was up on the roof, I'm surprised that the unit had functioned as long as it did! This is one of the original units installed when the store was first built in 1977; in HVAC terms, it must seem almost immortal!

The wet stuff you can see around the unit? That's oil from the compressor, which ruptured in a most dramatic (and unrepairable) way. Now we have to get a price on a new unit, wait for them to get it in, have a crane scheduled to hoist it up on the roof (how else did you think they'd get it up there?), and then get it hooked up. Oh, and pay them thousands of dollars.

Nothing else to do, though; we gotta have air conditioning! Right now, we can keep the store tolerable so long as the other three units keep working (and we use fans to move cool air from the three functional zones into the non-functional zone). I am keeping my fingers crossed that those units continue to perform their cooling duties well--however, as the tech pointed out, two of those three units are just as old as the one that failed!